I’ve worked at a couple of Mom & Pop places in the south during my youth, and generally they were terrible with money, racist, and tried avoiding taxes any way they could.

Small sample size with a sprinkle of confirmation bias on my end, but there are usually signs.

Always need help? Discount on cash purchases? Making the customer pay the credit card transaction fee?

There are many others, but those are generally the biggest ones where management is just interested in customer sympathy and the bottom line.

That’s disheartening to hear. At least Tesla has to sell cars to even stick around and it doesn’t look good for them in Europe so far.

I was about to say, this seems pretty slam dunk for them.

I’ve had this discussion with a friend of mine at length. He’s an “independent” and votes such. I think an approach to the 2 party system without ranked choice will always be a losing battle. We agree the system is broken, but have vastly different opinions on how we can approach it.

Trying to explain that systemic issues that go back generations cannot be solved overnight. Even 20 years would not be enough to see a large enough change in society, and how others are perceived. Think about it, our civil rights movement was only 60 years ago where people of color and whites were segregated and explicitly did not have equal rights.

Personally, and I hope I’m wrong, I see the next 4 years being a downward spiral. Those who voted for Trump are so closed minded, they grasp for anything that remotely supports their position.

It’s impossible to help those who do not want to be helped.

It’s difficult. You’ve got people that vote red or blue for no other reason than that’s what they’re told to do by peers/family. They don’t look at the possible outcomes, just that “they win”. And wanting to help people is almost looked down upon in many facets of society.

America has a critical thinking problem, coupled with an extreme lack of genuine empathy. Don’t let the “nice American” bit fool you if you ever travel here. The nice small talk is a front, and you can very easily find yourself in an uncomfortable situation. Health care is a great example. Or anything LGBTQ+.

Honestly, it’s a culture thing. It’s toxic as hell and hard to navigate.

Breakdown is probably a non-military version of “debriefing”. Just because you completed the project, doesn’t mean that there are’t obstacles you didn’t initially account for that you’ll need to address during the project. It also helps to break down (heh) how successful the project was, or if there will be follow up actions. Then you cleanup once unknown unknowns are taken care of.

It’s wild, I don’t remember the Witcher 3 being anywhere near this bad. I had my own issues in that game regarding the combat and some bs moments that made me reload and lose an hour because I was dumb and didn’t quick save, but cyberpunk doesn’t even feel like a cdpr game. Which is good in some ways I guess that they were able to break their own mold.

Idk, there’s just a bunch of little issues still. But if this is what it’s like 4 years later I can’t even imagine what it was like at launch.

I picked up cyberpunk last summer (finally) and while it’s visually stunning and fairly immersive, I had some game breaking bugs where I had to reload several hours beforehand and redo certain missions until they triggered properly. Not once, but several times. And I didn’t even mod anything.

I think my favorite was fast traveling with Claire, ending up in the sky and falling out of the truck. Reloaded, did the mission again only to splatter myself and die because I got shot out of the truck. Third time she wouldn’t stop driving around the block. I let it go for a good half hour just to see if it would end but it never did. Eventually the AI just kept driving into the wall of a building. Reloaded….again.

There were a lot of others but that took me all afternoon just to finish that one race. I had probably a dozen similar issues throughout my playthrough and it really tanked my enthusiasm for the game. I’ll finish it eventually.

They did give out actual Gwent decks when you preordered the expansions. Idk who made them, Warner Bros I think, but they’re pretty good.

The middle number 555 is used in fake adverts in the US. It’s not used anywhere.

The combat is just generally unintuitive. Which early in the game is frustrating. And if you’re like me and spend weeks between sessions you can forget all the timing and buttons you need to press.

If the combat is frustrating, turn the difficulty down. There will still be a learning curve, but it’ll be the difference between surviving and having to do an hour of work again because you forgot to quick save and get slapped by a foglet.

I’ve used them for a while too. Sometimes they’ll have weird keys super cheap. Like I was able to grab Dark Souls 3 + both DLC’s for like $16 or something way back when.

Virginia, so a bit of a wildcard.

I can’t quite remember all the details, but since my friend was still living with his parents he had to pay for the “catastrophic” insurance since he was over 26 and didn’t work with a company that offered anything. He might have been unemployed at that point. I think it was only $75/mo or so but I wonder if he just filled out the form wrong.

I won’t disagree, but the controlled narrative the Kremlin pushes is still very much the definition of propaganda.

It just shows how effective top down propaganda is.

Thank you for putting a name to a face. I’ve seen these gifs forever and never knew who they were.

Generally I don’t buy anything else other than Phillips. They’re usually bulletproof if you don’t get the smart bulbs. I’ve not had a Phillips fail in ~10 years. But that’s a sample size of like 30 or so bulbs.

Yep. When I moved into my house the previous owner had used all garbage Walmart LED’s. I think I had one fail each month and just bought a bunch on sale from Phillips eventually.

Most common failure was the driver. So they turned into strobe lights lol. Most annoying failure ever.

And more importantly, not every LED is dimmer compatible. Sometimes they’re super picky or just plain don’t work.